It is surely worthy of remark that the chief leaders of the Evangelical Revival were converted in mature life, not after a wild and reckless, but after a more than commonly religious youth. Among the associates soon to be gathered around them a very different type of spiritual history may be discerned. Many of these had been notoriously sinful, and their conversion had all the dramatic completeness which belongs to a sudden transformation of conduct and character. But of the Wesleys and Whitefield at Oxford, and subsequently of Fletcher, it might be said that they were "touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless." They fasted and prayed, and frequented the sacrament; they read religious books; they visited the sick and taught the ignorant; they eschewed all self-indulgence, were scrupulous in respect of duty, and consistently devout in spirit and manner. And yet the change wrought in them when they obtained a saving faith in Christ could not have been really greater if there had been a previous life of sin and folly to escape from. When a man passes from a righteousness of his own "which is of the law," to "that which is through faith in Christ," it is as truly a birth from above as when he is turned from sin to righteousness. The inner power and significance of conversion are the same in both cases. But this is widely misunderstood. That the wicked should be, if possible, converted, is generally held to be desirable. Society, even when most cynical and worldly, does, in a manner, hold that it behoves evil doers, especially among the lower orders, to repent of their sins and mend their ways; but that good people should call themselves sinners, that scholars and gentlemen of excellent character--whose only fault indeed was that of being righteous overmuch--should be anxious about their souls, and make other respectable people as uneasy as themselves, caused much irritation and perplexity.